From codex to code: digital perspectives in the study of the materiality of medieval texts

Although they might seem like complete opposites, the physical materiality of the hand-written manuscript and the strip of digital code have remarkable interconnections. It is not surprising to talk about code both in terms of material literary production (codex) and in terms of the series of alphanumeric instructions used to represent a text on the web (<code>).1 This essay investigates digital-philological trends, showing through concrete examples how they allow us to digitally re-visualize medieval texts in their original contexts, putting aside the filter of centuries of printed transmission, and to re-think the way we interpret them.